


A Change of World

by Euregatto



Category: Code Vein (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Poetry, Resolved Sexual Tension, Terrible Coping Habits Courtesy of Immortality, Yakumo Knows What's Up Even If Louis Denies It, selective mutism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-06
Updated: 2020-01-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:54:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22149025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euregatto/pseuds/Euregatto
Summary: “I wish I could make you mine forevermore, but—you don’t have to keep this up for my sake. I don’t feel comfortable asking anything of you, just because I’m being selfish—”“Youarebeing selfish,” she said, “and it’s pretty fucking mutual, so am I.”or, Louis helps the Queenslayer recover some of her lost humanity.
Relationships: Io & Protagonist (Code Vein), Louis & Cruz Silva, Louis & Yakumo Shinonome, Louis Amamiya/Protagonist (Code Vein), Louis/Protagonist (Code Vein)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 74





	A Change of World

**Author's Note:**

> Happy New Year, I'm hyperfixated on Code Vein. Enjoy!
> 
> Takes place after beating the absolute shit out of Mido. Insert it where you will.  
> The poem recited here is parts from "The Demon Lover" by Adrienne Rich, which is one of my favorite poems of all time.

* * *

_Your heart utters its great beats  
in solitude. A new era is coming in.  
Gauche as we are, it seems  
we have to play our part._

From _The Demon Lover_ , by Adrienne Rich

* * *

“Your name,” Louis said suddenly, a bit too loudly. In the corner of his eye he saw her jolt in place, and her head snapped in his direction, gaze narrowed. “Ah, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

His companion shrugged. Louis knew her well enough by now that she wasn’t upset with him, but with herself—to be surprised meant she’d let her guard down. She’d stopped thinking about the danger. That was a luxury reserved only for their safe haven, but even then she never seemed to feel secure. Only tired, and distracted, and maybe a bit bored, always finding something to fix. Avoiding sleep.

He continued, “Adrienne. I like that name. It reminds me of a poet in the book I have back at base.”

His voice ricocheted through the empty, war-torn halls of what had once been an apartment complex on the upper-east side of the city. In the earlier days of Operation Queenslayer, he allowed himself the luxury of filling these places with memories that were, questionably, not his to revive, but the warmth they incurred filled his chest like an egg was cracked open behind his ribs, slowly spreading downwards, and he almost mistook the longing for nostalgia. A past that maybe he _did_ live, but not _that_ way, or perhaps, not for _that_ long.

Now, though, the thoughts were a hollowed distance between the edges of a mountain ravine. He’d forgotten so much. Maybe he’d forget everything, if he died enough.

Louis decided to divert his mind back into the present.

“You like poetry, don’t you?”

Adrienne looked at him again. The shadows of the decrepit corridor were slotted over her features, and the slanted light was lucky enough to fall across her cheek. Louis relied on her body language, her movements, and her expressions to know what she was conveying. She made herself easy to read.

She considered his question, and nodded.

“I can recite from memory, if you want. I imagine it might help fill some of this terrible silence. This place is…awfully quiet, isn’t it?”

Adrienne drew up to an apartment with the door slammed off its hinges. She raised her halberd up before her and swept into the room quickly. It was a one-bedroom flat, devoid of life and sound, exactly like every other place within the Mists.

After a moment she turned back to him and nodded again.

 _“Something piercing and marred,”_ he said, leaning his shoulder against the wall to shift some of the weight off his posture. _“Take note, look back. When quick the whole northeast_ _went black and prisoners howled and children ran through the night with candles…”_

She drew close to him, listening attentively. He became acutely aware of their proximity. Shrinking, he realized, always growing smaller with each day, each fight, each death.

 _“…who stood off motionless side by side while the moon swam up over the drowned houses? Who neither touched nor spoke? Whose nape, whose finger-ends nervelessly lied the hours away?”_ He mustered enough courage, the kind of bravery he thought had to be learned, to reach up with curious fingers and push her bangs away from her glasses. “Do you like this one?”

Adrienne inclined her head once more. She leaned her head into his touch, fitting her cheek into the palm of his hand.

 _“A voice presses at me. If I give in it won’t be like the girl the bull rode, all Rubens flesh and happy moans. But to be wrestled like a boy with tongue, hips, knees, nerves, brain…”_ She was closer now, drawing into him. _“…with language? He doesn’t know.”_

A memory occurred to him. Cruz, splayed out in her recovery bed following another bout of _fits,_ as Karen delicately called them, her hand knitted in his as he recited this same poem to her. Or, perhaps it was a different one, though he’d forgotten after his—third, fourth, fourteenth death?

_He doesn’t know. He’s watching breasts under a striped blouse, his bull’s head down._

“Louis?” Adrienne uttered, so suddenly, so quietly he almost thought her voice a figment of a half-remembered dream. It was always jarring to hear her talk. She never spoke in the field, only uttered their names to get their attention, just enough to remind Louis she could.

“Sorry,” he said. “For a moment there I thought of—”

He framed her face with his hand, thumb hooked around the base of the blood filter. They were close enough now that he inched forward on reflex and their masks scraped together with a metallic hiss. Her free hand was at his waist, grasping the hem of his vest, anchoring him against her in this exact moment, this exact place.

“No, it doesn’t matter,” he said to her, more distantly this time, echoing the pain of having had something within him knocked loose at some point. “ _The old wine pours again through my veins—”_

“Adrienne!” Yakumo exclaimed from down the hall, and Louis stepped back to suddenly he collided with the wall. A split second later their friend appeared in the doorway with a pack of cigarettes displayed proudly in his hand. “Look what I found!”

Adrienne’s eyes brightened. Purple stars against the dark backdrop of the world.

 _“Menthol,”_ he added, like it was some big trade secret.

A creature of momentum, of intaking the inertia required to clear a finish line, she moved quickly and with such purpose that she crossed the room and swiped the gift from him in the space of time between two heartbeats. She hefted the pristine pack over her head as if crowning it king.

“Knew you’d enjoy it,” Yakumo said coyly. He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb. “Mia found it in the apartment down the hall. I don’t know if there’s any left, but it couldn’t hurt to check, right?”

Adrienne was gone in a flash, the blur of midnight blacks and reds from her blood veil smudged out behind her. Yakumo looked at Louis and raised his eyebrows. A look his best friend would know anywhere. Yakumo was the kind of person who’d always been keen on the world and others, knowing without words, who would adversely and quite hilariously miss an individual’s directed affections towards him if they struck him straight in the heart.

“Did I interrupt something?”

“I don’t know,” was all Louis could muster up the strength to say. Which was true.

“Maybe I can partner up with Mia again,” Yakumo said, still sounding sly, the kind of smug attitude that made Louis want to choke him out, “and we can split up, like that old cartoon of those kids with that dog. You know what I’m talking about?”

He didn’t, but he must have, because the deep vertigo in his stomach never came from nowhere. Louis turned his garnet eyes away from his friend and to the old couch in the center of the room just so he could have something else to focus on. “I already ask so much of her. Of all of you, really. I won’t ask more.”

“Louis—”

“That’s my decision, Yakumo.”

Yakumo raised his hands defensively, open-palmed. “Alright, alright. Sorry! I was just teasing a bit.” The apology almost mustered a pass but he beelined straight into fucking it up with, “When was the last time you kissed another person, anyway?”

“I’ll let you know when I find that vestige.” Louis allowed a small, rueful smile to grace his face, though Yakumo couldn’t see it beneath the mask. “Assuming it exists.”

Their laughter echoed down the hall, reflecting the memories they’d once cherished near, an old time in an older place—when two boys each had people they loved dear, and their pasts, unforgotten, which propelled them forward without end.

* * *

Adrienne could rarely sleep through the night. Then again, sometimes they went days without more than an hour’s rest before each reliable sundown, so she suspected that expeditions were outweighing her previously healthy schedule. Somedays she awoke with such clarity and such exhaustion she thought if she moved she might die. That it would be easier if she did. Some nights, when her sleep was dreamless and violent, she abandoned her empty room and wedged herself next to Io on the shrine. The attendant dutifully, albeit tenderly, held her successor until morning—kindness transposed into the need to feel human and mortal and living. If either of them got any rest was purely a gamble.

Tonight was no exception. She awoke, startled, to the void of the night, with deep, deep silence that rescinded little by little when distant noises rose up to take its place: Yakumo, wide awake still, reciting the code of his platoon to keep their memory near; Murasame’s restless tinkering in the weapon’s vault, someone who, like Adrienne, or a poet—or anyone with questionable impulse control, really—needed to do something with her hands; a breathy moan from the room Eva and Jack had taken up together next door, audible despite the thickness of the walls.

After nearly half an hour of staring up at the ceiling, reflecting on the echoes of her terrible dreams and worrying her thumbnail down with her teeth, Adrienne got up, got dressed, and wandered silently down the long halls of the chapel Louis and Yakumo had converted tirelessly into a home. She emerged into the main foyer. Here, though Rin’s working was made more prominent, fluent in the brutality she claimed to have forgotten all those years ago, it was polite enough that even Io remained unconscious through it all, so the atmosphere was comparatively placid.

Louis was at his desk in the corner by the bar, cheek rested on his fist, a book splayed open in his lap. Adrienne opened her mouth to address him and found her words unresponsive.

(She’d been selectively mute her whole childhood—a _disorder,_ her family’s doctor claimed, that she felt too paralyzed to speak in any situation where she didn’t feel safe. Her habits subsequently carried over to her adulthood, and her friends were understanding, just not of how frustrated she became by her own hesitations.)

Instead she went to the patio, lit a cigarette with the gold-plated lighter Jack let her borrow weeks ago and willfully forgot he gave away, and perched in a chair. She folded one leg over the other. Thought of—the constellations in the sky, foreign blood in her veins, a woman in a blue dress. Anything that wasn't here or now. Anything that was something else but what she was.

Louis’ visage breached the corner of her vision. He sat in the chair parallel to her left, hands folded in his lap, all business-like. They were silent until the cigarette was burned nearly to its filter. An old habit. One she hadn’t revisited until months ago, when they found a carton in near perfect condition, tucked away in an over-turned military crate. _Bad habits_ , Yakumo once justified, _are now just habits of wanting to feel human._

“Are you contemplating what Jack and Eva said?”

She nodded, finished her last drag, and flicked the cigarette butt over the railing. There was nothing _else_ to think about. It was a decision with finality. A living death. To make it or to have it made for her.

She slowly put her head forward, into the palm of her hands, and her shoulders trembled.

“Louis.” She swallowed the rock in her throat. “I didn’t want this.”

 _But you were in it the minute you killed Cruz_ , he thought bitterly, though he knew it wasn’t her fault. Instead he reached over and touched her back, where he felt her whole body quaking like a self-contained aftershock. “Hey. I’m here. _Everyone_ is here for you. We’ll get through this together.”

She returned to silence. Her body gradually ceased shaking, and she nodded into her hands. An unspoken _I know._

“I have that book I was talking about,” he said. “Would you like to read it?” Another defeated nod. He stood from his chair and gently caressed the crest of her head. “Okay, I’ll be right back.”

He retreated to his room. As he turned his back to the threshold to search for the collection on his lower bookshelf, a familiar presence filled the gap between the frames, and Adrienne pushed her way inside the bedroom, stepping around the stacks of texts and old journals and scholarly bullshit she adored as nothing more than a form of escapism. He whirled around, unsurprised.

“Oh, what are you—”

She kicked the door shut with her heel. The impact ricocheted through the still night air.

“Adrienne?”

She closed the space between them. Her hands skated up the front of his vest. He felt her fingertips across the thin veil, the softness compressed by the softness of her touch, yet her strength in it, understated but real—in the way she pressed him back against the bookcase, maintaining their distance. 

He tried to talk. His throat felt dry. In that moment she looked—

There was a time when they were children, Karen dropped her favorite doll into the river, and that evening their father strode through the door with the waterlogged toy in hand; found it washed up on the shoreline, he’d said. That was how Adrienne was now, wide-eyed and trembling, exhilarated by a thought akin to something she deemed lost forever being hers again to cherish.

He glimpsed down at her lips, parted open, begging to let him in. She took his wrist, guiding his palm to her breast. His other hand went to the small of her back and slid under her shirt, up along her hunched spine, as if she were coiled to strike out and kill him.

“Adrienne,” he said again, feeling like he’d been knocked in the head by her very presence.

“I heard what you said to Yakumo.”

When she talked, it was with purpose. In that moment, it kept him from falling apart in her arms, from collapsing to the floor and begging her, _Don’t take on the relic, don’t go to the throne. I can’t do this again_. _I can't lose_ you _again_.

Louis grappled the reigns of his sanity and found his voice. “I meant it,” he said. “I’m being selfish.”

“Then I’m going to ask you for it,” she uttered. “I need to know. You. Me. The way of the world.”

She put her fingertips into his skin, scouring crescent marks with her nails into his neck, up his jawline and to his cheeks—and then she was _kissing_ him, arms around his neck, feverish and open-mouthed and hungry and so exactly what he’d always wanted but never found the words to articulate. He could do nothing but let his mouth be worked open by hers until finally his nerves ebbed away. He tugged at the little belts securing her chest in place, hands shaking. They melted together, flesh-on-flesh and teeth-on-flesh, filling the air with little gasps and moans.

She broke off for only a moment, just long enough to focus on undoing the buttons along the front of his vest, and he said to her, “I wish I could make you mine forevermore, but—you don’t have to keep this up for my sake. I don’t feel comfortable asking anything of you, just because I’m being selfish—”

“You _are_ being selfish,” she said, jarring him again with her voice, “and it’s pretty fucking mutual, so am I.”

Their mouths collided. One of them tasted like smoke and the other tasted like iron and neither of them knew nor cared which was which. Louis compiled enough momentary bravery to push her backwards, angled towards the bed, knocking her onto it. His vest came off, pooled at his feet, as she toed off her boots and found the corner of the nightstand for the glasses she probably didn’t even need anymore. A little piece of her old humanity, he thought, and this time not bitterly.

Then there were no words between them, only the intake of knowledge. Learning each other all over again as they’ve always done since the day they met in the deep, hollow depths—body language, momentum, groans, barred teeth.

Through it all Louis couldn’t shake the feeling he’d been here before, in another time and place—with a woman whose hair reflected starlight and with eyes as blue as the horizon where the sea met the sky. He failed to remember the significance of it. Only that he looked at Cruz then as he looked at Adrienne now—sadly, lovingly, and distantly aware that this would be the last time he would cherish the most important thing in his life, right before he lost her forever.

* * *

Afterwards, they didn’t sleep, and the early remnants of dawn speared through the tiny window and fell across the two lovers entangled in threadbare bed sheets. Louis’ fingers skated over the exposed arch of Adrienne’s shoulder, foreshadowing the wings of her ascension; he followed her pulse point down to her heart, where he felt it stutter behind the cage of her chest.

“Do you know the rest of the poem?” she asked him quietly, half-awake.

“Some of it,” he said, leaning in close and taking her lips against his. _“Goodnight, then.”_

“Night,” she uttered, misinterpreting.

He laughed in his chest. _“Night. Again we turn our backs and weary, weary we let down.”_

For a moment, Louis blinked and there was another woman beside him, in her platinum dress and silver hair, bunched up against the low pillow. Cruz slept soundly for the first time in such a terribly long time. He thought he could smell the sterilized scent of the room, the cotton of the sheets, the blood.

 _“Things take us hard, no question,”_ he continued, putting his palm on Adrienne’s face, stroking the arch of her cheek with the soft pad of his thumb. _“How do you make it, all the way from here to morning? I touch you, made of such nerve and flare and pride and swallowed tears.”_

She tucked her head into the crevice of his shoulder. He kissed her brow and took in the scent of her hair—the ashen aroma of mistle, the cotton of the sheets, the blood.

_“Go home. Come to bed. The skies look in at us, stern.”_

Louis shut his eyes against the memory.

_“And this is an old story…”_


End file.
